CHAPTER LIX.--"A DREAM WHICH WAS NOT ALL A DREAM."

Brief though my nap of "forty winks," I had within it a little dream, induced, no doubt, by my return to Wales, and by my surroundings, as it was of Winifred Lloyd, of past tenderness, and our old kind, flirting, cousinly intercourse, before others came between us; for Winifred had ever been as a sister to me, and dearer, perhaps. Now I thought she was hanging over me with much of sorrowful yearning in her soft face, and saying,

"Papa will not be here for an hour, perhaps, and for that hour I may have him all to myself, to watch. Poor Harry, so bruised, so battered, and so ill-used by those odious wretches!"

Her lips were parted; her breath came in short gasps.

Was it imagination or reality that a kiss or a tress of her hair touched my cheek so lightly? There was certainly a tear, too!

I started and awoke fully, to see her I dreamt of standing at the side of my chair, with one hand resting on it, while her soft eyes regarded me sadly, earnestly, and--there is no use evading it--lovingly. She wore her blue riding-habit, her skirt gathered in the hand which held her switch and buff gauntlets; and though her fine hair was beautifully dressed under her riding-hat, one tress was loose.

"Dear Winifred, my appearance does not shock you, I hope?" said I, clasping her hand tenderly, and perhaps with some of that energy peculiar to those who have but one.

"Thank Heaven, it is no worse!" she replied; "but, poor Harry Hardinge, an arm is a serious loss."

"Yet I might have come home, like Le Diable Boiteux, on two wooden stumps, as Dora once half predicted; but even as it is, my round-dancing is at an end now. By the way, I have a sorrowful message for you."

"Then I don't want to hear it. But from whom?"

"One who can return no more, but one who loved you well--Phil Caradoc."

A shade of irritation crossed her face for a moment; and then, with something of sorrow, she asked,

"And this message?--poor fellow, he fell at the Redan!"

"His last thoughts and words were of you, Winny--amid the anguish of a mortal wound," said I; and then I told her the brief story of his death, and of his interment in the fifth parallel. Her eyes were very full of tears; yet none fell, and somehow my little narrative failed to excite her quite so much as I expected.

"Did you not love him?"

"No," she replied, curtly, and gathering up the skirt of her habit more tightly, as if to leave me.

"Did you never do so?"

"Why those questions?--never, save as a friend--poor dear Mr. Caradoc! But let us change the subject," she added, her short lip quivering, and her half-drooped eyelids, too.

I was silent for a minute. I knew that, with a knowledge of the secret sentiment which Winifred treasured in her heart for myself, I was wrong in pursuing thus the unwelcome theme of Caradoc's rejection; moreover, there are few men, if any, who would not have felt immensely flattered by the preferences of a girl so bright and beautiful, so soft and artless, as Miss Lloyd; and I found myself rapidly yielding to the whole charm of the situation.

"How odd that you should have returned on my birthday!" said she, playing with her jewelled switch, and permitting me to retain her ungloved hand in mine.

"Your birthday."

"Yes; I am just twenty-three."

"The number of the old corps, Winifred--the number, see it when he may, a soldier never forgets."

"But I hope you have bidden good-bye to it for ever."

"Too probably; and you cannot know, dear Winifred, how deep is the pleasure I feel in being here again, after all I have undergone--here in pleasant Craigaderyn; and more than all with you--hearing your familiar voice, and looking into your eyes."

"Why?" she asked, looking out on the sunlit chase.

"Can you ask me why, when you know that I love you, Winny, and have always loved you?"

"As a friend, of course," said she, trembling very much; "yes--but nothing more."

"I repeat that I love you tenderly and truly; have I not ever known your worth, your goodness--"

"Is this true, Harry Hardinge?" she asked, in a low voice, as my arm encircled her, and she looked coyly but tremblingly down.

"True as that God now hears us, my darling, whom I hope yet to call my wife!"

"O, say it again and again, dear Harry," said she, in a low voice like a whisper; "I did so doubt it once--did so doubt that you would ever, ever love me, who--who--loved you so," she continued, growing very pale. "It may be unwomanly in me to say this, Harry; but I am not ashamed to own it now."

"To a poor cripple, a warlike fragment from the Crimea," said I, with a smile, as caressingly I drew her head down on my shoulder; and while I toyed with her dark-brown hair, and gazed into her tender violet-coloured eyes, I thought, "How can a man love any but a woman with eyes and hair like Winny's?"

(At that moment I quite forgot how fatuously I had worshipped the thick golden tresses, the snow-white skin, and deep black eyes of Valerie. And it was for me that Winny had declined poor Phil, Sir Watkins, and some one else! O, I certainly owed her some reparation!)

"Bless you, darling, for your love," said I; "and I think our marriage will make good Sir Madoc so happy."

"You were ever his favourite, Harry."

"And you have actually loved me, Winny--"

"Ever since I was quite a little girl," she replied, in a low voice, while blushing deeply now.

"Ah, how blind I have been to the best interests of my heart! I always loved you, Winifred; but I never knew how much until now."

"I am sure, Harry, that I--that I shall--"

"What, love?"

"Make you a very, very good little wife, and be so kind to you after all you have undergone."

As she said this, with something between coyness and artlessness that proved very bewitching, I pressed her close to me, and there flashed upon my memory the dream of her, as I lay wounded and athirst near the ditch of the Redan, and also the singular coincidence of her pet goat leading to my discovery when lying half buried under the dead horse and cannon-wheel on the field of Inkermann.

"Papa and Dora," said she, in a low broken voice, "on that day when my great grief came--"

"Which grief?"

"The tidings of your being drowned," she continued, weeping at the recollection, "and when I let out the long-hidden secret of my heart, told me not to weep for you, Harry; that you were far happier elsewhere than on earth; that you were in Heaven; and poor papa said over and over again the Welsh prayer which ends Gogoniant ir Tad, ac ir Mab, ac ir Yspryd Glan."

"What on earth is all that!" I asked, smiling.

"Glory to the Father, the Son, and so on. Well, Harry, it was all in vain. I felt that in losing you I had lost the desire of my eyes, the love of my girl's heart--for I always did love you, and I care not to tell you so openly again," she added, as the tender arms went round me, and the loving lips sought mine. "My crave for news from the seat of war, and the terror with which I read those horrible lists, Harry, are known to myself only; yet why should I say so? many others, whose dearest were there, must have felt and endured as I did."

"All that is over now, pet Winny."

"And you are here with us again, Harry."

"And am yours--yours only!"

"But there is the bell to dress for dinner, Harry--and here come Dora and Gwenny Vaughan," she added, giving a hasty smooth to her hair, which somehow had been a little rumpled during the preceding conversation.

The two girls came in for a minute or so, in their hats and riding habits; the last-named was a very beautiful and distinguished-looking blonde, who could talk about hunting like an old whipper-in, and who received me with kind interest, while Dora did so with her usual gushing empressement.

The dinner, which came subsequently in due course, was rather a tame affair to Winny and me, when contrasted with our recent interview in the drawing-room; but the tender secret we now shared, and the perfect consciousness that no obstacle existed to our marriage, made us both so radiantly happy, that Sir Madoc's rubicund face wore a comical and somewhat perplexed expression, till we had our postprandial cigar together in the conservatory. So the whole affair came about in the fashion I have narrated; yet but a day or two before, I had been affecting a desire to visit the Russian prisoners at Lewes!

At table, of course, I required much assistance, and though I urged that Owen Gwyllim or one of the footmen should attend me, there was often a friendly contention among the three girls to cut my food for me, as if I were a great baby; and like something of that kind, I was flattered, petted, and made much of; and there was something so pleasant in being thus made a fuss with, and viewed as a "Crimean hero," that I scarcely regretted the bones I had left at the Redan.

"And so, poor Harry," said Dora, after hearing the story of that affair, "you had no brave beautiful Sister of Mercy to nurse you?"

"No; I had only Corporal Mulligan, a true and brave-hearted Irishman, who lost an eye at Alma; and a kind-hearted fellow he was!"

Winifred did not talk much; but in her place as hostess seemed brilliantly happy, and quite her old self. We had all a thousand things to talk of, to tell, and to ask each other; and the fate of that strange creature Guilfoyle, or rather the mystery which then attended it, excited almost the commiseration of Sir Madoc, who, once upon a time, was on the point of horse-whipping him. On certain points connected with my residence at Yalta, I was, of course, as mute as a fish.

Of Caradoc he spoke with genuine sorrow--the more so, as he was the last of an old, old Welsh line.

"Poor fellow!" said he; "Phil was a man of whom we may say that which was averred of Colonel Mountain, of the Cameronians, 'that though he were cut into twenty pieces, yet every piece would be a gentleman!'"

Over our cigars, I told Sir Madoc all that had passed between Winifred and me, and begged his approbation; and I have no words to express how enthusiastic the large-hearted and jolly old man became; how rejoiced, and how often he shook my hand, assuring me that he had ever loved me quite as much as if I had been a son of his own; that his Winny was one of the best girls in all Wales--true as steel, and one who, when she loved, did so for ever.

"I thank Heaven," he added, "you didn't get that slippery eel, my Lady Aberconway!"

"So do I, now, Sir Madoc," was my earnest response.

But I had not yet seen quite the last of Estelle Cressingham.

Of her Winifred must, at times, have been keenly and bitterly jealous, yet she was too gentle, too ladylike and enduring, to permit such an emotion to be visible to others.